Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
believe such things about babies, about women and children and human beings in general? How could they believe in such innocence, such lack of recognition of the realities, as in MacDonald’s terrible story? But besides the obvious moral didacticism there is also here a more complex symbolism around that dead baby. In one sense, it seems to have to do with angels, with care, the soul, God’s mercy and pity. In another sense, the dead baby is a symbol of a psyche so deprived that it cannot live and fulfill itself. The deprived baby evokes the problem of the mother who could not keep it alive, and so we come to the figure of woman, in relation to feelings about her, and the extent to which she is to be blamed for our failures to fulfill ourselves. Even as Dickens embarked on public readings in which he strove to appear to uphold the domestic virtues, he was suffering the worst anguish of not being able to establish order and harmony in his own life, was separating from his wife, whom he considered impossible, and was (apparently) keeping a mistress. So the image of woman, in this dimension, is the focus of a deep existential perplexity; and if we attend carefully to his work, we find it leads us to a strong current of guilt around these themes and a sense of something dreadful and murderous in the background.
The Victorians, of course, had developed a heavy taboo on sexuality and on the whole reality of woman. This demonstrated an impossible and harmful desire, which we find in Dickens, that woman should be “innocent.” The sentimentalized baby in their art, live or dead, is a symbol of that innocence—and this means sexual innocence, before the Fall. If only the production of babies could be split off from sexuality and the passion that creates them! We may link this unrealistic sentimentality with the fear of libidinal woman.
In the scenes under discussion in Bleak House, the greatest play is made with the contrast between the innocent babe, victim of its parents’ gross-ness, and the violence between the parents:
She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before, that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise and violence and ill-treatment, from the poor little child. (108)
The innocent child is thus separated from the sexual energy that generated it, to which the violence belongs.
We may recall the way, discussed above, in which Mrs. Bumble falls into violence only two months after marriage. In Martin Chuzzlewit a similar change overtakes Merry Pecksniff when she marries Jonas and becomes subject to his violent domination. This is clearly related to her sexual knowledge of him, and the point is underlined by Sarah Gamp’s professional interest in her possible pregnancy, at the time of her wedding. It is as if sexual union inevitably produces antipathy and discord, and marriage hatred. The horrified submissiveness of Mrs. Quilp, in the face of his cruel tyranny, is another of Dickens’s portrayals of a dreadful marriage, and Quilp’s deformity is calculated to make the sexual union of this pair repulsive.
Behind such dealings with sexuality one often detects in Dickens a deep dread, which displays an unconscious fear of sex as a death-threatening activity; and the concomitant is that creative woman has some of that death-threatening power. Later we shall explore this further in examining Dickens’s attitudes, and those of his public, to illegitimacy and illicit passion, and so to the dark side of woman—including man’s darker attitudes to woman, and Dickens’s own somber side.
In Bleak House the baby dies, even as Ada bends over it:
Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew her back. The child died. (108)
Besides the sexual themes behind babies, of course, there is the inheritance or birthright theme. Esther Summerson is a focus of our feelings about babies coming into the world, their birth, raising, and inheritance: birthright (as in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case) is, one may say, the theme in this novel and in many other novels by Dickens. Dickens’s Christian feelings about dead babies seem here to be made plain:
Presently I took the light burden from her lap; did what I could to make the baby’s rest prettier and gentler; laid it on a shelf, and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. (109)
The Victorians must have been more acquainted than we are with dead children; but it seems to belong to a certain Christian fairy-story attitude to death, as in George MacDonald’s story, for Esther to say “to make the baby’s rest prettier and gentler.” People who deal with actual dead babies must surely feel a deep distress, and even dread; no doubt they arrange the corpse as decently as they can: but never, surely, would the word “prettier” seem appropriate? However, the dead baby is by now virtually an angel, and is used as a contrast to our earthly state, with Christ being evoked in a powerful way, for His attitude to children.
Dickens has another moral purpose here, of course, having to do with the nature of charity: the scene is intended to contrast with the invasion of the brick maker’s privacy by Mrs. Jellyby’s associate, Mrs. Pardiggle. She represents the wrong kind of evangelism, the kind that patronizes and offends: she cannot cross the gap to the poor. Among the poor there is brutality, ignorance, and suffering. It would be better for them to have the consolations of a true knowledge of Christ’s teaching, but this can only be brought home to them by those who are prepared to share their suffering, who are capable of showing love in action. Such people can invoke the words of Jesus at the critical moment—as here, or as when Jo is dying and Alan Woodcourt makes him repeat the Lord’s prayer at the end. Clearly, Dickens believed in the urgent necessity of applying the principles of Christian compassion, and conveying the Gospel to those who were lost without it.
When Mrs. Pardiggle leaves, the difference between her charity and that of Esther and Ada is made plain:
I hope it is not unkind in me to say that she certainly did make, in this, as in everything else, a show that was not conciliatory, of doing charity by wholesale, and of dealing in it to a large extent. (108)
The influence of the (true) Christianity of Ada and Esther, by contrast, has the effect of bringing out the best in the poor.
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another; how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and GOD. (109)
All this is powerfully didactic, but we recognize it as that excellent impulse in Dickens, under the influence of the words of Jesus Christ, to show that the poor will always be with us, that they too were created in the image of God, and that we should try to understand all conditions of people and seek the “good side” in them. His renderings of characters like Mrs. Gamp or Jo, the Artful Dodger or Mr. Weller Senior are in consequence always humanly sympathetic and positive, as is his touching treatment of little orphaned Charley and her siblings.
But in Bleak House the theme belongs to that fairy-tale mode of belief in the supernatural world that can make Esther say,
How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon the tiny sleeper underneath, and seemed to see a halo shine around the child through Ada’s drooping hair as her pity bent her head—how little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would come to lie, after covering the motionless and peaceful breast! I only thought that perhaps the Angel of the child might not be all unconscious of the woman who replaced it with so compassionate a hand. (Ill)
Did Dickens really believe in “Angels”? Or is he merely making Esther an innocent believer in them? Did his readers believe in angels? I suppose they might well have done, for there is no doubt that they were exceptionally fervent in religious matters, while their devotional beliefs were a matter of intense interest, as the periodical literature of the time shows.
But, for my purposes, such episodes give the clues to Dickens’s unconscious preoccupations. Esther has an affinity with the dead baby: her mother has always assumed that she died at birth. When she finds out that her child is still living, but is desperately ill, Lady Dedlock obtains